If ever you’ve splashed and slogged your way to Bryn Cader Faner, the finest bronze age monument in Britain according to the archaeologist Frances Lynch, then as you were sitting in the ring cairn with its corona of out-facing stone spears, you may have wondered, like me, what commerce travelled along the adjacent ancient trackway two millennia ago? It wouldn’t have involved heavy goods, that’s for sure.
The track threads its way through the northern Rhinogydd, the roughest of hills in Eryri, and perhaps by way of Afon Dyfrdwy, before heading for the English shires. Its starting point is Mochras – “Shell Island”, with its popular campsite on the holiday coast of Ardudwy. Shell middens (heaps of discarded shells) there provide evidence of occupation that was perhaps contemporaneous with the construction of this great cairn at some unknown date. That’s not cut and dried though – the size of some shell middens attributed to Neolithic man suggest they may have been in use over great swathes of history, not just this moment in time.
One species frequently discovered by those prepared to root around among the detritus is the dog-whelk. Its shell is easily recognised: a large opening, plump body, a short spike appended. You find them often in the intertidal zones of most Welsh beaches. Inedible, they had a unique property that made them a valued commodity in the so-called dark ages. A colourless mucus secreted by their hypobranchial glands, when it reacts with air, displays a sequence of colour changes before becoming a glorious purple. Ancient dyers used it for Roman imperial togas. The ninth-century Barberini gospels have panels coloured using whelk dye. Bede wrote of the “beautiful whelk-dye that does not fade through sunshine or rain”.
I wonder if travellers along the rough way from Mochras discreetly carried in leathern pouches small phials of this commodity more precious than gold coins.
The sun slips beneath grey cloud cover, and slants in upon fractured rocks so that they glow as vivid as any illuminated manuscript. Witnessing this, did our phantom travellers cross themselves and give thanks for the sublime natural beauty they carried with them from western seas?
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